San Francisco’s homegrown hostility to new development has made it the epicenter of California’s housing crisis. It will now become a testing ground for a newly empowered state government’s ability to force liberalizing reforms on a city that repeatedly refuses to build. On Tuesday, the state’s Department of Housing and Community Development (HCD) announced that […]
Is Walgreens an illicit drug dealer? That’s essentially what a federal court has ruled, suggesting the pharmacy should have stopped “suspicious orders” for opioids from being filled. In failing to do so, the retailer “substantially contributed” to the opioid epidemic in San Francisco, Judge Charles Breyer of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District […]
Los Angeles hotel owners are speaking out against a ballot measure that would force them to house homeless people in vacant rooms. The Los Angeles City Council last week voted to place the measure on the March 2024 ballot. The city would pay the hotels the “fair market rate” for rooms occupied by the homeless. […]
Across the country, legislators are piling on regulations and restrictions that make it harder to build and maintain affordable housing at a time of desperate need. In Dover-Foxcroft, a small town in Maine, a drafted moratorium on manufactured housing says it “threatens the area’s character and cultural value of the town.” In Blount County, Alabama, […]
On Wednesday, protesters flooded People’s Park in Berkeley, California, chanting, “Housing is a human right, fight, fight, fight!” The reason the crowd was protesting? The University of California, Berkeley, was set to begin construction on a student housing project, which would not only house 1,100 Berkeley students at below-market rates, but also provide subsidized apartments […]
Housing advocates and their Democratic allies in Congress are hopping mad that the reconciliation bill that the White House and congressional leadership have worked out with Sen. Joe Manchin (D–W.Va.) doesn’t include any more federal funds for housing. “The recent information about what has been made available in this deal…is shameful, I’m embarrassed by it. […]
On the campaign trail, Eric Adams—then a candidate for mayor of New York City— promised to prioritize reopening playgrounds in housing projects. A year later, more of them are closed than before, according to a report in The City by Reuven Blau and Candace Pedraza. “Families need safe outdoor spaces to reclaim a sense of normalcy,” […]
In a sign of California housing politics’ increasingly pro-supply tilt, state housing officials are openly praising San Francisco Mayor London Breed for vetoing a local ordinance that would have made development much more difficult. The vetoed ordinance, passed in a contentious 6–4 vote by the San Francisco Board of Supervisors earlier this month, was sold […]
A bipartisan coalition of Not In My Back Yarders (NIMBYs) remains aghast at two of the most significant and praiseworthy new laws that California has approved in years. They are gathering signatures to qualify a statewide initiative that would overturn Senate Bills 9 and 10, which jump-start housing construction throughout the state. S.B. 9 allows property […]